foetus: [14] Foetus comes from Latin fētus ‘giving birth, offspring’, which also gave English fawn ‘young deer’. It was a noun use of the adjective fētus ‘pregnant, productive’, from whose derivative effētus English got effete. Probably it was related to Latin fēcundas (source of English fecund [14]) and fēlīx ‘happy’ (whence English felicity), and there could even be etymological links with fēmina ‘woman’, from which English gets feminine and female. => effete, fecund, felicity